The Last Voyage of the Vollmer Twins

Van Vollmer, photographed in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in August. Photo by Simone Wilson

UPDATE, Nov. 18: Read the latest on the now-famous Vollmer twins and their plans to set sail.

The flyers began appearing on walls and doors in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, during the first week of August.

“Brooklyn Sea Captain seeking crew!” they announced. In smaller print, next to an image of an old sailing ship, the ads explained that a “longtime Brooklyn contractor” was seeking 12 able-bodied men and women to join him for a two-year trip around the world aboard the Peacemaker, “a 158-foot three-masted Barquentine.” The boat would set sail on approximately Aug. 31, the ad said, and anyone interested should email a gentleman named Van Vollmer.

“The adventure of a lifetime,” the ads promised. “No experience necessary.”

Navigating the streets of Williamsburg two weeks later, Mr. Vollmer’s big grey eyes grew wider as he talked about the crew he planned to put together for the voyage of a lifetime.

“I’ll train them to feel the boat. I don’t care what’s up here,” he said, tapping his temple, which was red with sunspots. “When you sail a boat, you feel the wind; you feel the tide; you feel the rudder. It’s like being one with the boat in the water.”

At first meeting, Mr. Vollmer might seem an unlikely organizer for such an ambitious trip. Eighty-five years old, stiff-jointed, rickety but improbably upright, he shuffles like a crab against the flow of hip, younger residents who’ve taken over the neighborhood where he and his twin brother Carl lived for 40 years, beginning in the 1970s.

“I want to go down a chute into the water and swim with the fishes for eternity.”

The twins have been priced out of the neighborhood — these days, they live together, as they have for the last four decades, aboard a 42-foot cabin cruiser docked in the Bronx — but they still consider Williamsburg and Greenpoint home. The locals, many of them five or six decades younger, recognize the Vollmers in the street and greet them with affection as they make their way around the neighborhood.

“Here, have some chocolate cake!” Malin Landaeus, the owner of a vintage clothing boutique near the Bedford Avenue subway stop, said to Van as he stepped into her shop, which he helped build a decade ago. She snipped a loose thread from his shirt button.

Somewhere among Brooklyn’s newer residents, Van said, he believes he can find 12 to 16 souls worthy of the grand journey he has planned. The itinerary will include hopping the Greek Isles, learning foreign languages, scuba diving off the Great Barrier Reef and searching for gold in sunken Spanish galleons. And somewhere along the way, years from now, if all goes according to plan, the crew of the Peacemaker will be called on to perform a solemn task: that of sliding the Vollmer twins’ bodies into the ocean.

The Peacemaker. Photo by Don Gunn

That’s because once the Vollmer brothers set sail, they don’t plan to return. “I want to go down a chute into the water and swim with the fishes for eternity,” Van said over a pint of Blue Moon in Williamsburg.

“We want to spend the rest of our lives on this boat,” said brother Carl, who ordered red wine. “We want to get thrown overboard.”

But before the Vollmer twins can embark on their final voyage, they have to tidy a few loose ends. First, they need a crew. That’s where the flyers come in. Specifically, Van is searching for a mechanic, a nutritionist, a cook, a personal trainer and a scientist, among other men and women with useful trades. And he’s not keen on settling.

“One person can destroy a trip if they don’t fit,” Van said.

There’s also the matter of the ship. The Vollmers don’t technically own the Peacemaker — yet. It currently belongs to members of an obscure Christian sect based in the Southeastern U.S., a few of whom are still living aboard the Peacemaker in a tiny harbor in St. Mary’s, Georgia. They’re asking at least $3 million.

Purchasing the Peacemaker, assembling its crew and provisioning the vessel for two years at sea might seem a tall order for a pair of self-described penniless 85-year-olds. But Carl said this is just the kind of pinch in which the Vollmer twins thrive — and always have.

“We have a separate talent than most people,” he said. “We’re problem solvers.”

The ‘Hood

On a recent Monday evening, Van Vollmer sat behind the wheel of a Toyota Corolla he’d borrowed from a friend, driving down the side streets of his old neighborhood. Every now and again, he’d point at a building and say, “I built this place” — referring to his years as a woodworker — or, “I lived there once.” When Van points at things, he does so with a stub of a right index finger. The rest was chopped off in a workshop accident. Carl, too, lost half his left pinky to a boat motor while lobster diving.

Van Vollmer on the streets of Brooklyn, where he lived for 40 years with his brother Carl. Photo by Simone Wilson

In the time the Vollmer twins have lived and worked in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, the neighborhood has changed, changed and changed again.

“There was a guy who ran that motorcycle shop on the corner, named ‘Slick,’” Van said as he drove. “He used to say that when he grew up he wanted to be like the Vollmer twins.” Slick, Van said, died years ago.

“We’ve outlived everybody,” he said.

The Vollmers’ relationships with new residents have been forged from a familiar pattern: A local faces a logistical hardship of some kind or other, and the Vollmers find a way to fix it.

When the owners of a restaurant called Cantina Royal, for example, were having trouble hanging a Fiat-sized chandelier in the main dining room, Van devised a strategy for hoisting it up with chains hung from beams. His twin brother Carl executed the plan.

Julio Mora, the restaurant’s young executive chef, said that when he accidentally gunned his car into a garage door at his girlfriend’s mom’s house, it was Mr. Vollmer who put it back together.

“I brought it to Van in a hundred pieces,” Mora said. “I owe that man my life.”

“It’s a way of thinking,” Van said. “You solve problems.”

The Dream

The Vollmers grew up in Greenwich, Conn., the sons of an architect and a retired ballerina.

They lived in a mansion with a butler and maids until the Great Depression hit, at which time they moved into a nearby row house. The family later scattered — the parents to Florida, Van to the Navy and Carl to the Army. But not before the Vollmers learned to sail. When the boys were seven, their father built them a small wooden sailboat that the boys used to explore the shallows of the Long Island Sound.

“I never thought I’d be able to do something like this. But when my buddy said, ‘I got the money to buy the boat,’ that’s when I started dreaming.”

“I’ve read probably somewhere between 200 and 300 books about sailing since I was a little kid,” Van said. “It fascinates me.”

In the past 20 years, Van estimates he has delivered 15 large sailboats for clients who needed them transported up or down the East Coast. He and Carl, too, have owned a number of boats in varying states of disrepair, including the powerboat they now call home. However, Van said, none of his life’s adventures at sea compare to the “pleasure trip” he’s dreamed up.

“I never thought I’d be able to do something like this,” Van said. “But when my buddy said, ‘I got the money to buy the boat,’ that’s when I started dreaming.”

Van’s buddy — he declines to name him, for fear of jinxing their arrangement, although others refer to him as “Felix” — is in his 60s, he says, divorced, with a daughter, and a victim of the same aquatic wanderlust that afflicts Van. He’s one of 20 brokers involved in a $4 billion deal involving Venezuelan bonds that will come through any day now, according to Van. This friend, he says, has pledged to put a portion of his take toward the $3 million Peacemaker and its upkeep as it circles the globe.

The bridge (above) and the mess (below) of the 158-foot Peacemaker. Photos courtesy of Larry Clinton

At first, Van explained, Felix wanted to buy a trimaran. Van had no experience with that kind of boat, so he convinced Felix to let him do the shopping. For the last two years now, Van said he’s been looking at yachts online; along the way, he checked out a German lightship, a three-masted schooner and “several Turkish ships.”

“None of them interested me,” Van said.

A few months ago, Van said, another friend in Key West told him about a boat in a local harbor bearing a “For Sale” sign. It boasted an enclosed wheelhouse — a key feature for Van, who doesn’t want to be exposed to weather while at the helm. The yacht had stained-glass appointments and five staterooms, each richly paneled with mahogany millwork. Van remembers telling Felix he had found the one.

“The woodworking is superb,” Van said. “The boat is so clean, you could eat off the engine room floor.”

Van claims his buddy will transfer him the money for the boat as soon as the Venezuelan bond deal comes through.

“I talk to him three times a day,” Van said. “The deal is done. He wants to sail away.”

The Boat

Larry Clinton, the man tasked with selling the Peacemaker, calls it “a 4,000-square-foot mansion.”

Like the Vollmer twins, the Peacemaker has a rich past. A Brazilian industrialist built it in the late 1980s as a pleasure craft, then sold it to a Christian sect that calls itself the Twelve Tribes around the year 2000. Sect leaders repurposed it as a goodwill vessel for missionary work.

“We’ve used it to bond our communities all over the world,” said Clinton, 64, a higher-up in the Twelve Tribes. “We also go places to introduce people to our life in the community.”

According to Twelve Tribes legend, the Peacemaker once survived a 100-knot microburst in the Gulf of Mexico that blasted it broadside and tipped the ship 50 degrees. “Had the ship been a different ship, one less stable, it wouldn’t have survived,” Clinton said.

Twelve Tribes members aboard the Peacemaker. Photo by Cathy Smith

These days, Clinton said, the younger members of Twelve Tribes aren’t as interested in the sea as their elders, so it’s time to sell.

Rick Ross, an author on cults and a longtime critic of the sect, is more cynical about the history of the Peacemaker. He points to a 2001 New York State Labor Department investigation finding the Twelve Tribes guilty of putting underage children to work in upstate soap factories. The Peacemaker, he said, is likely so exquisite thanks to hard labor — “virtual slave labor,” Ross called it — that Twelve Tribes members perform in return for room, board and community inclusion. He expressed concern that proceeds from the sale would go directly to Twelve Tribes leaders instead of those who “scrubbed and scraped and sanded and finished it.”

The Vollmer twins don’t seem to mind. “Our dream is the death of another dream,” Carl said.

Clinton and the sect have offered to sell the ship to Van for $3 million, down from their original $3.4 million asking price. The two parties have also worked out a deal, Clinton said, whereby a handful of seasoned Peacemaker crewmembers from the Twelve Tribes will accompany Van and his crew for the first leg of the 2015 trip, to help them learn the vessel’s quirks. The only transaction left, Clinton said, is the actual payment and transfer of the ship’s title.

“He keeps telling us that the funds are going to be available any day,” Clinton said. “I don’t know what kind of pleasure he would get out of leading us on.”

The Crew

Anyone hoping to vet Van Vollmer online before applying to sail with him around the world will be disappointed. He doesn’t have much use for Facebook — or what he calls “Tweeter” — so the only search results Google finds for his name are a few comments posted to local blogs by disgruntled customers of his contracting work and some of Van’s own rambling posts on conservative Web forums.

“We’re so far right, we fall off,” Van said.

His lack of an online presence hasn’t discouraged at least 12 young men from applying for crew positions on the Peacemaker.

“A part of me has to believe this is a hoax, because I never imagined an opportunity like this would ever exist.”

Within a few days of his flyer campaign, emails from potential crewmembers began to appear in his inbox. Most are from men in their 20s and 30s who live in New York City. There’s Collin, an assistant at a New York-based event planning company; Chad, a 29-year-old freelance film producer; Zea, who says he works at a lobster restaurant in Greenpoint and wants to help cook and clean; and Gregory, 30, a medical assistant with CPR training who’s also worked as a barber. (Gregory promises to give the crew “great haircuts.”)

Scott, a writer and app developer in his early 20s, wrote in an email to Vollmer that he has wanted to become a sailor since he was a little boy, to follow in the footsteps of his two great-grandfathers, both sea captains, he wrote, who sailed the Caribbean and South Atlantic in the 1800s.

“A part of me has to believe this is a hoax,” he wrote, “because I never imagined an opportunity like this would ever exist.”

Van’s brother Carl plans to serve as the Peacemaker’s master-at-arms. In this role, he’ll keep the ship safe from uninvited guests and enemies at sea. “I was in the Korean war,” he said. “If somebody [hostile] comes aboard, I’ll shoot ‘em.”

Van thinks he may have found a first mate, as well — a 36-year-old “girl magnet,” he said, named Steven. (Van more often refers to him as “my protégée” or “my guy.”)

“I want to make him first mate because at his age, he’s got a lifetime to use the knowledge,“ Van said.

On a recent Friday evening, Steven took a car from Manhattan’s Financial District to meet the Vollmer twins at a tapas bar in Williamsburg.

Steven, who descends from a secretive Southern California real-estate fortune, asked that his last name not be used in this story. Thin, around six-feet-four, with a slightly anxious manner, he arrived at the tapas bar with his cuffs rolled back to his elbows. On his arm was a 25-year-old woman with puffy lips who wore her brown hair swooped back from her forehead, like Katherine Hepburn. She was a PhD candidate, she said, studying the Mennonites. Although the young woman politely turned down Van’s repeated invitations to join his crew as an anthropologist-in-residence, Steven assured Van he was all in. How could he refuse a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, he asked, to “live like the beatniks”?

“Van kind of brings it up and he’s like, ‘I want to teach you everything I know so when you dump me into the sea you can take over.”

Steven recently bought a sailboat of his own, Carl had claimed before Steven arrived, but has no clue how to sail it.

“He knows no more about sailing than you do,” Carl said to this reporter. “He’s a young — what’s the word? — a millennial. He’s a trust fund child. But I guess Van has taken a shining to him.”

The Vollmer twins, Carl (left) and Van (right), at a tapas bar in Williamsburg. Photo by Simone Wilson

Steven appears to be equally enamored with Van. “He’s my buddy,” he said. “He’s the most interesting guy in the world.”

The first mate said he has unwavering faith in Van’s ability to helm the Peacemaker. “He’s surprisingly able-bodied — it amazes me,” Steven said.

Steven is not so keen, however, on the plan to throw the Vollmer twins overboard when they die.

“They keep referring to that,” he said. “It’s a little weird. Van kind of brings it up and he’s like, ‘I want to teach you everything I know so when you dump me into the sea you can take over.”

“I’m hoping that’s just some kind of expression,” Steven said. “It’s not something I really want to think about.”

The Voyage

As Friday night wore on, Van opened up about a set of unique rules he plans to enforce onboard.

No drugs or hard liquor will be allowed on the Peacemaker, he said — except for rum. “No French fries,” Van said. “Only good, healthy food.” Crewmembers will be required to enroll in one or more Great Courses on the Internet — the ship will host several wifi hubs, he said — and teach what they’ve learned to the rest of the crew. All crewmembers will be required to bring aboard at least 20 books, a quarter of them non-fiction, in order to build a library. Language classes will be held in the afternoons.

The crew will also be provided uniforms — old-fashioned sailor pants fastened with 13 buttons and, on top, yellow-and-white striped shirts — to wear whenever the Peacemaker pulls into harbor. This way, Van said, the ship can earn appearance fees. All earnings will be distributed evenly between crewmembers per official voyage debit cards.

The more Van talked, the more excited he became. He described the gym he planned to build onboard, the aquaponics system, the desalination machine for purifying seawater and the flash freezer for preserving fresh fish. To secure the ship’s smart mechanics, he said, he would build a Faraday Cage to ward off possible electromagnetic warfare, should relations deteriorate between the U.S. and Russia while the Peacemaker is at sea.

“Yes, he has big dreams. “But I think that’s how he’s gotten by this long.”

Van talked until 10 o’clock.

“Bring me the bill, and I’ll sign it,” he then said to the manager of the tapas bar, a young woman in a buzz-cut and Bettie Page eyeliner who did not appear to recognize him. She asked for his credit card, but Van left only his autograph.

“I built this place,” he said on the way out, to no one in particular. The manager just watched him leave.

The Love Story

Those close to the Vollmer twins speak of them protectively, and with an air of awe for their optimism. At the same time, they seem to share a concern that the twins’ plans for their final voyage might not pan out.

“Yes, he has big dreams,” Landaeus, the Williamsburg boutique owner, said of her old friend. “But I think that’s how he’s gotten by this long.”

Next to Carl, the person who knows Van best — and who may have the most to lose, if his plans pan out — is an 85-year-old woman named June Raymond who lives in Atlanta.

Their relationship is a testament to his persistence. The two knew each other growing up in Greenwich as kids, Raymond said, and fell in love as teenagers. But when Van left for the Navy, June married another man — a marriage that lasted nearly six decades.

A few weeks after her husband died six years ago, she received a call from Van. “I was sitting there and the phone rang, and he said, ‘Are you June Ferguson?’” she recalled, using her maiden name. “I hadn’t seen him in 60-something years. He said, ‘I’ve been looking for you.’”

“We talked a while, about what we’ve been doing,” she said. “He said, ‘Do you mind if I call you tomorrow night?’ He’s been calling ever since.”

“I never stopped loving her,” Van explained.

The couple still speaks almost every evening by phone. They make frequent trips, Van to Georgia and Raymond to New York, to visit one another. Ferguson even stopped by the powerboat where the Vollmer twins live, though she chose to spend the night elsewhere.

“I’m just praying this thing will go through. Because he’s got his heart set on it.”

“They live like bachelors,” she said. “He calls up Carl and he says, ‘Carl, I’m bringing June home — clean the bathroom!’ And Carl runs into his room and straightens everything up.”

On the question of the voyage, Raymond is torn. If anyone could pull off something this grandiose, she said, it’s Van. “He’ll say, ‘Oh, I can do that’ — and he does it,” she said. “If I say, ‘I wish I had a lamppost,’ and I go out shopping for a while and come home – I’ve got a lamppost.”

The thing that has her worried, Raymond said, is the business with Felix and the Venezuelan bonds. She’s never met the man, she said. And while she’s always known Van as someone who finishes what he starts, she’s also known others in his life to be less reliable.

“He has to depend sometimes on other people, and if they don’t come through, then it falls through,” Raymond said. “And he gets so excited he tells other people about it, and then they get excited about it. That makes it harder.”

“I’m just praying this thing will go through,” she said. “Because he’s got his heart set on it.”

The Peacemaker under sail. Photo via Wikimedia

Steven, Van’s first mate, echoed Raymond’s concerns. “I hope it happens,” he said. “If it doesn’t happen, I hope he doesn’t get too discouraged.”

Carl — the more practical of the twins, they both say — has his worries, as well. “He has a great deal more faith in the man than I do,” Carl said, referring to Van and Felix. “If it happens, it’s going to be nice. If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t change my lifestyle.”

Van said he’d reach out to Felix and set up an interview. But as of publication, Felix hasn’t agreed to talk, and Van still prefers to keep his financier’s full identity under wraps.

Setting Sail

Van Vollmer, a professional can-do man, doesn’t bother himself with the skepticism that surrounds him. He puts the odds of Felix coming through at precisely “eighty-nine and a half percent.”

With only two weeks before his scheduled departure on the voyage of a lifetime, Van has been running around town, finishing up odd jobs. He’s in the final stages of carving a set of window frames for a landmarked building, he said, and helping the owner of Williamsburg’s Miyako Sushi, recently shuttered, sell off his tables and chairs and find a buyer for the space.

But mostly, Van is using this time to focus on what he calls his “adventure into the wild blue yonder.”

He has drawn up a master list of crew applicants and their individual skills and has been interviewing them, one by one, both by phone and in person. He has also planned a 30-day training course in Florida for his crewmembers before they set sail, and has mapped the first leg of their itinerary, which will take them through the Panama Canal, to American Samoa, the Philippines, Australia, the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean, weather permitting.

“This is my swan song,” Mr. Vollmer said. “I have no platform on which to stand other than the fact that I’m doing it.”

“You can’t have a dream come true,” he added, “if you don’t have a dream.”